By Joseph Tumushabe

25^th July 2011: The year was 1970. My father and mother decided I was old enough to start school. I was six and would in two months become 7 years. My mother, four months earlier embarked on a crash programme to prepare me for school. Her goal was to ensure that by the time I went to school I knew how to read my name and write a few words like abaana (children), ente (cow). It was an ambitious programme for a Primary Four drop out.

Some of the methods she employed were less than diplomatic, but somehow she pulled off the miracle and managed to infuse into my brain basic numeracy (counting 1 up to 20 and being able to write them out) and literacy skills (the entire alphabet and ability to write some words in Runyankore (my local lingua).

More important, she managed to convince me that there was nothing more important than education in life. Her threat if I did something mischievous was always:  “…you will not go to school”.

If you are wondering why I never went to nursery school, I dare say in my World of rural Bushenyi, nursery school was by 1970 unheard of. About a third of the children never had more than 1 year of schooling. But nearly all who went to school were better in numeracy and literacy than the bulk of those churned out of schools today.

Then in early February 1970, I put on my school uniform and started school about 2 kilometres away at Nyandozo Primary School in the then Ankole District. My first week was memorable in that I was promoted from writing in the sand to the black wooden slate in one day; then from the wooden slate to the book the following day. This act gave me a feeling of importance. And I have you Maama to thank for this.

My teacher Mrs Cecilia Bitamire was a stunningly beautiful woman. She also loved us as children and we loved her back. She knew how to handle us that we dreaded Fridays and always looked forward to return to school on Monday.

One of the first lessons I learnt from her was that to be a leader you had to work harder and be smarter. You also had to get the best for the people you led and lead by example. Thus the class monitor had to be cleaner, earlier at school and work with others to ensure the classroom was swept clean and slates and books were neatly arranged before they left for home.

As I reflect on these formative years I wonder where we went wrong as a generation.  What crime did we commit as a nation to get such selfish empty heads for leaders?  We have failed to improve the quality of schooling to such an extent that not a single Minister has his children in any UPE school.

Electricity has become such a luxury that the powerful and rich must steal or pay themselves better than US Congressmen so that they can get money to install solar energy panels in their homes.  Fixing the national grid so that we all get power immediately is not a priority.  MPs pay is the first item on the agenda!  Clean water is a luxury.

If you cannot afford bottled water then prepare for the hospital or clinic stint. Potholed roads are the norm. Hospitals without drugs are not a surprise. In fact we have been conditioned to expect much less of our leaders that for them to do a human thing for our society amazes us.

This morning I woke-up wondering what Uganda would miss if we had one-month without the government.  Would we miss the lies, cronyism, nepotism, brutality, lack of direction, pettism or what?  Would we miss the “I am not bothered, I am not concerned” response to the national economic crisis?  Help me here because I don’t have an answer.

My 1970 hopes and expectations of what leadership should provide have become so disillusioned that I wonder whether Mrs Bitamire was wrong or whether our generation was so daft that we could not understand basic lessons of decency required of leadership that flowed from the lips of teachers of her generation and the example they led by. END.  Please login to www.ugandacorrespondent.com every Monday to read our top stories and anytime mid-week for our news updates.